The Past in the Present

A man keeps meeting the same fight. The same grief comes round on the same date, the same accusation lands in the same place, years after the thing itself is over. Sometimes it is his own past he cannot get out of. Sometimes it is someone else's, and he is the one it keeps being aimed at. The world has noticed this and has answers on offer, and three of them are worth taking seriously, because each is half right. This letter takes the three in turn, says plainly what is true in each and where it fails, and then goes to the place Scripture goes every time, which is not a technique but a Person who did the thing first.

1. The pattern you keep repeating

The world's version. A line credited to Carl Jung says that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. The exact wording is disputed, but the idea is his school's, and the clinical name for it is Freud's: repetition compulsion, the mind setting up the old situation again, hoping this time to win it. You have seen it in somebody. A man whose father went silent for three days whenever he was angry, who now goes silent for three days. A woman who was left once and who now finds a reason to leave first, every time, just before it could happen to her. A man on his fourth job with the same impossible boss, who cannot see that he chose the fourth one. You did not find them, the saying goes; you selected them. The only exit, on this view, is to see the pattern from outside it.

What is true in it. The pattern is real, and Scripture named it eighteen centuries before Freud. "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:19). A man can watch himself do the thing again. He can name it, date it, write it in a notebook, and do it anyway the next night. Insight is not deliverance, and anyone who has tried to think his way out of a habit knows it.

Where it fails. The world says seeing the pattern is the way out. Paul says seeing it is where the despair starts: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:24). The answer is in the next verse, and it is not a method. "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 7:25).

There are really two cases here, and Scripture keeps them apart. Sometimes a man genuinely does not know. "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Peter said it to the crowd that had just killed the Lord: "I wot that through ignorance ye did it" (Acts 3:17). Paul said it of himself: "I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief" (1 Timothy 1:13). David knew he had blind spots and asked God for help with them: "Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults" (Psalm 19:12). That is the Greek idea, and it is often true. Show the man, and he changes.

And sometimes he knows exactly. "Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" (Romans 1:32). "Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). "Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin" (James 4:17). This is the case Kierkegaard named. The old Greek teachers had said a man does wrong because he does not know better. "Christianity goes a little further back and says, it is because he will not understand it, and this in turn is because he does not will the right." He saw it, and he did not want it. That refusal, standing in front of God, is what Kierkegaard meant by despair. Not sadness. A man can live in it for years and call it his personality (see Kierkegaard).

The two need different medicine, and this is the practical part. The man who does not see it needs to be shown, gently, and when he sees it he will change. The man who sees it and does it anyway will not be helped by being shown again, and showing him again is what most of us do, over and over, for years, to no effect. He does not need more information. He needs to repent. Telling the two apart is the whole skill, and the hardest case is yourself: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9).

So the pattern is shown to a man not so that he can fix it, but so that he will stop trying and ask. That is how David prayed it: "Search me, O God, and know my heart… and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24). He does not say, and I will fix it. He says, and lead me.

And your wife is carrying one too. Every version of this idea I have heard puts the pattern inside one man and tells him to look at it. But in a marriage, in a family, in a church, there is a second person with a second pattern, and a husband cannot see his wife's as easily as he can see his own. Ten years after a wound, the wounded one still reads today through it, and does not choose to. A man was laid off twice in three years, and now every time his manager asks for a quiet word he spends the walk down the corridor composing his answer. He knows it is probably about the parking. He composes it anyway. A memory the body learned is not undone by an argument, however good the argument is. It is undone by a long run of ordinary days in which the feared thing does not happen. You cannot do that half for anyone. What you can do is stop being the pattern. "Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out" (Proverbs 26:20). "Leave off contention, before it be meddled with" (Proverbs 17:14). A fire goes out only when nobody adds wood to it.

And sometimes the other person sees what you cannot

All of which cuts the other way too, and this is the half a man is least willing to hear. His wife can often see his pattern when he cannot see it himself. That is not her interfering. In Scripture it is a mercy, and it is how God has usually done it.

James says the reason plainly. A man who hears the word and does not do it "is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was" (James 1:23-24). Your own mirror does not hold. You walk away from it and the picture is gone. Even at our best "now we see through a glass, darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

So God sent Nathan. David had lived with what he had done for the best part of a year, with his own conscience and his own psalms, and nothing had moved. Then another man told him a story about a poor man and one lamb, and said four words: "Thou art the man" (2 Samuel 12:7). David answered, "I have sinned against the LORD" (2 Samuel 12:13). A year of looking at himself had not done what one afternoon with someone else did (the whole scene is in Thou Art the Man). And Scripture makes that ordinary work, not a prophet's office. "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend" (Proverbs 27:17). "Faithful are the wounds of a friend" (Proverbs 27:6). "Exhort one another daily… lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13).

Which is worth saying against something earlier on this page. You cannot do another person's healing for them, and that is true. It is not a licence to stop listening to what they are telling you. A husband cannot do his wife's healing for her. He may also be the last person in the house to understand what he is doing that makes it harder, and she may be the only one who can tell him. The world's answer here is a therapist, a paid outsider, and the world is not wrong that a man cannot see himself. Scripture's answer is older and a great deal closer: the friend, the brother, the husband, the wife, the one already in the room. That is part of what marriage and the church are for (see Marriage).

When one of you can see it and the other is in the way

There is a third arrangement, and in a marriage it is the common one. It is not either of the two above, and writing it as though it were is how most of these conversations go wrong.

Take a couple, and call them Dana and Marcus. Dana can see the thing. She has seen it for two years, she knows exactly what she has to do about it, and she is genuinely doing it, quietly, most days, without being thanked for it. Marcus cannot see it at all. He is not lying about that; he honestly cannot see it. And without meaning to and without any idea that he is doing it, he does the one thing that makes her work hardest, three or four times a week. Then comes a bad night, and she fails at the thing she has been holding for two years. And Marcus, who never saw the two years, sees only the failure, and takes it as proof that she never meant it.

Both of them are doing something. Only one of them can see what is happening. That is not an even contest and it should not be described as one.

Scripture says three things about this at once, and the page needs all three or it turns into a weapon. First, making another person's obedience harder is a real sin with its own name. "It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come" (Luke 17:1). "Woe to that man by whom the offence cometh" (Matthew 18:7). "Judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother's way" (Romans 14:13). And it is aimed straight into the house, at whoever holds the upper hand there: "ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath" (Ephesians 6:4), "lest they be discouraged" (Colossians 3:21), and "ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge" (1 Peter 3:7). God would not command a father not to provoke his child if it were impossible for one person to make another's obedience harder. It is possible, it has a name, and it carries a woe.

Second, and immediately, the stumbling block never excuses the one who stumbles. Look where Luke goes two verses after the woe: "Take heed to yourselves" (Luke 17:3). The woe belongs to the one who trips you. Your feet are still your own. Paul says both in one chapter and means both: "Bear ye one another's burdens" (Galatians 6:2), and eleven verses later, "every man shall bear his own burden" (Galatians 6:5). So Dana's bad night is still hers. Marcus's three or four times a week are still his. Neither of those two facts cancels the other one.

Third, and this is the turn. The one who can see is not owed relief for seeing. She is handed more to carry. "We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves" (Romans 15:1-2). "Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others" (Philippians 2:4). Sight is not a credit. It is a commission. By every worldly measure that is unfair, and it is exactly what Christ did: the only one in the whole story who saw everything carried all of it, for people who did not know what they were doing.

And now turn the chairs around, because most couples take turns in them. There is something Marcus can see that Dana cannot, and she is standing on his foot in some way she has never once noticed, and on that subject he is the one carrying two years of it quietly and she is the one who would be astonished to hear it. Neither chair is the righteous chair. They are just the two chairs, and you sit in both of them in the same week.

And at the end of every human mirror there is One who does not need to be told anything. He "needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man" (John 2:25). He is the only one who sees the whole of it, and the only one who has never once used what He saw against the person He was looking at.

2. Fighting what already happened

The world's version. Nietzsche had a phrase for the cure: amor fati, which is Latin for love your fate. Not accept it. Not survive it. Love it. Want nothing in your life to have gone differently, not one thing, not ever.

The reason people find that powerful is the picture that comes with it. A man arguing with something that already happened is split in two. Half of him is pushing against a thing that cannot move, and the other half is trying to live today, and neither half has his whole strength. Make peace with what happened and you get yourself back: all of you for today, instead of half of you for today and half of you for a thing that is over.

What is true in it. The split is real, and James named it in three words: "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways" (James 1:8). Paul gave the cure: "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark" (Philippians 3:13-14). A man re-arguing last week is not present this week. He is in the shower finishing a conversation from three years ago, saying the thing he wishes he had said, winning it at last. He is driving to work explaining himself to a manager who fired him in 2019. The record he is correcting is not in the room, and the people who are in the room can tell.

Where it fails. "Love your fate" describes a man so hard that nothing can hurt him any more, and that is not the Christian picture. Joseph did not love what his brothers did to him. He said something else, and the difference is the whole faith: "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive" (Genesis 50:20). He did not love the pit or the prison. He trusted the One who had worked through them. Paul says the same in the verse everyone knows: "all things work together for good to them that love God" (Romans 8:28). Not all things are good. He works them. That is trust in Providence, and it is not the same as loving the event (why God allows the event at all is taken up in Why God Allowed Sin). Christ Himself was not hard like that. He wept, He bled, the blow went in, and "when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously" (1 Peter 2:23). He did not love the cup. He committed Himself, and drank it.

Read past the famous verse. Seventeen years after Joseph forgave them, their father died, and the brothers panicked: "Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him" (Genesis 50:15). They sent a message begging forgiveness he had already given, "and Joseph wept when they spake unto him" (Genesis 50:17). He wept because they still thought it. After seventeen years of proof, they were still living in the old story. And he did not demand that they stop. "Fear not: for am I in the place of God?… Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them" (Genesis 50:19-21). That is what a man does when the other person is still afraid of him after all the evidence. The fear is theirs to lose, in their own time. The kindness is his to keep giving, and he keeps giving it.

3. Give me to drink

The world's version. Benjamin Franklin had an enemy in the Pennsylvania Assembly, a new member who spoke against him. Franklin did not send him a gift. Having heard that the man owned "a certain very scarce and curious book," he wrote and asked to borrow it, "return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour," and, he says, "we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death." He quotes an old maxim for it: "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged." Psychologists later tested this and found the effect is real, though modest: people who are asked to do a small favour warm slightly toward the one who asked them. Modern advice has stretched that finding into a rule, that the people you serve the most are the ones who will value you the least, and that all your years of giving have been buying a loyalty that was never for sale. Some of it goes further still, and tells a tired husband or a tired friend to stop giving and start asking, as a method for getting the affection back.

What is true in it, and what is not. Franklin's point was narrow: asking a man for something small can dissolve a hostility that giving to him would not. That much is true, and it is worth knowing if you have spent years serving someone and watched the distance grow anyway. The man who does everything around the house and feels invisible in it. The daughter who has sent money home for a decade and has never once asked her mother for anything. But that stronger rule is the modern addition, not Franklin's claim, and it is certainly not Scripture's. The Bible never tells a giver to expect resentment. It says give, and it aims every warning at the giver's motive, not at the receiver's gratitude. "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35) still stands.

Where Scripture had it first. The world offers the asking as a clever move. Christ did it as love. Before He offered the woman at the well the one thing that would ever satisfy her, He asked her for something. "There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink" (John 4:7). She was astonished that He would ask her for anything (John 4:9). He, who needed nothing from her, asked first, and only then: "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water" (John 4:10). The asking opened the door the giving walked through. So if you are the one who has served and served: let the other person give you something small and real, take it with thanks, and use it where they can see it. Ask her to teach you the thing she is good at and you are not. Ask him to fix the thing you could have fixed yourself. Wear it, use it, eat it, and say where it came from. That is not a technique. It is what it looks like to treat someone as a person with something to offer, instead of a debt you keep paying.

4. Two men who went lower on purpose

There is a fourth thing the world does not say, because it has no category for it. Two men in Scripture, each facing a past that would not end, chose to go lower instead of higher, and let God decide their worth.

The first is Hosea. His wife had left him for other men, and God's word to him was not to wait for her to come back sorry. "Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress" (Hosea 3:1). "So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley" (Hosea 3:2), together about the price of a slave, part in coin and the rest in grain. And then: "Thou shalt abide for me many days… so will I also be for thee" (Hosea 3:3). He did not make her earn the way back. He paid the price and set the terms, and the terms were that he would be hers. God told him to do it "according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel," which means Hosea's marriage was a picture of yours, from God's side.

The second is David, dancing before the ark in a linen ephod, and his wife Michal meeting him in the doorway with contempt: "How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself" (2 Samuel 6:20). She had her own past in that sentence, Saul's daughter, given away and taken back, and she aimed it at him. He did not defend his dignity. "And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour" (2 Samuel 6:22). The Hebrew puts two words against each other. "Vile" is qalal, to be made light, to weigh nothing. "Honour" is kabed, to be made heavy. David is saying: I will make myself nothing in front of you, and let God decide what I am worth. That is the opposite of every worldly answer above. Not see your pattern, master your fate, manage your favours. Go lower, and let Him decide your worth.

Where this lands

All three of the world's answers are about the self. See your pattern. Master your fate. Manage your favours. Scripture's answer in every one of these places is a Person who did the thing first. Paul's wretched man is delivered by Christ, not by insight. Joseph's "God meant it unto good" is the cross in miniature, spoken by a man who was sold for silver by his brothers and fed them anyway. Hosea bought back the one who left. David made himself nothing and was given honour. And "Give me to drink" was said at a well by the One who, three years later, would say from the tree, "I thirst" (John 19:28). He asked her for water so that she would ask Him for life. He is still asking, and the thing you cannot get free of is the thing He is asking you to give Him. Not so that you can carry it better. So that He can.

Scripture from the King James Version, linked to the Study Bible; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Franklin from his Autobiography, Part One (public domain). Kierkegaard quoted briefly from The Sickness Unto Death, Part Second, on the Socratic definition of sin, in Walter Lowrie's translation; Nietzsche's phrase from Ecce Homo and The Gay Science; the line credited to Jung is widely repeated and its wording is not settled, and it is given here as the idea, not as a quotation. See also Marriage, Forgiveness, Suffering, Overwhelmed, No Spark and Why God Allowed Sin.